Heart of America

A conversation with US novelist, Philipp Meyer, about his bloody, morally confronting, critique of one of the founding mythologies of America: ‘how the west was won’. Meyer’s grand, sprawling, novel, The Son, refuses to pander to conventional versions of American frontier history - either the romanticised “John Wayne” version, or the “noble savage” take on it. As he tells Paul Barclay, no one was innocent on the Texan frontier. Recorded at the Brisbane Writers Festival.